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The Very Worst Uses of Windows
bigplrbear writes "I found an interesting article revealing the many places that Microsoft products reside, and what they're used for, ranging from elevators to ticket scanners."
From the article: "Thanks to VMWare Windows is spreading throughout the datacenter. And, of course, there is only one operating system to use if you are dependent on Microsoft apps like Outlook, Word, and Excel. While I have joined the chorus of security folks who rail against the Microsoft Monoculture I still cannot believe some of the uses for Windows. Some of them are just downright silly, some you may claim are criminally negligent." Note: I'm making no claim of criminal negligence!
Mac OS X?
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-
Medical equipment: I confirm. My cousin is an engineer for General Electric, Medical section. As far as I know he services cardiac echography equipment. From what he told me, they all run Windows. Of course, this isn't life threatening, but I do know he's hardware guy and it wouldn't be the first time he calls me for a software problem in his job.
While not in this case, a BSOD may mean real "D" these days in a hospital.... Sad, but true...
While I agree this is questionable, I don't think they are connected to the internets (at least I hope not). So, the whole virus/worm fear is probably irrational.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
I've seen quite a few... every ticket machine at Melbourne Airport one day was going through a BSOD-reboot loop, placed quite a workload on the human employees. I really don't understand how any company who's done a tiny bit of research could think Windows is an appropriate platform for something that should really be running a custom embedded system like a cut-down *nix.
We have a 350MHz spectroscope in our lab that has embedded XP. Now if we go for few seconds of RF sampling, it writes Time vs Signal values as a CSV file. Now the funny thing is you can't open files with more than 65000 rows in excel and since the spectroscope itself has nothing but windows applications, none of them is capable of displaying the saved samples. You have to transfer the sample data to another computer and open them through Labview or Matlab or some such tool. Why would a spectroscope costing nearly $30,000 be running Windows.
Face your daemons!
Yeah, but that's because photosynthesis software only runs on Windows
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Yep, The prison where I worked as a guard for a while changed their control center from mechanical switches to a PC running XP. I worked the control center a lot and the "upgrade" sucked. You had to page thru several screens to see all the doors and the touch screen was too sensitive. You could open 2 doors or the wrong door by accident. The interlock system was suppose to prevent that by requiring you to use both hands to open doors, but it proved to be impossible to use so it was disabled. the OS was always crashing (likely the shitty program) and you had to wait for the system to reboot before you could open doors without the keys.
Paper Clip: Do you mean Airbag?
Face your daemons!
In Phoenix we have a power company called APS. In some of the gas stations there are kiosks that allow you to pay your bill using Cash. I was walking through a circle K the other day, and to my horror i saw this:
link
Sorry about the shitty image quality...I took it using my crackberry.
Yes, that is a dialog box politely informing you that you have been Trojaned.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
A good chunk of the Command and Control systems on most modern (or most recently refitted) naval vessels in the United States' inventory run on Windows technology.
It kinda gives me the shivers knowing that one of our ships could be sunk by an "inbound" because the point defense system is suffering a BSOD...
During the birth of my first daughter, the fetal heart monitor was connected to a Windows box. Trust me, the last thing you want to see in the middle of a long, difficult and painful birth is a BSOD...especially when the doctor is desperately searching for a heartbeat.
Also, a few months ago I stopped at a bank machine to withdraw some cash.
So I entered my PIN and withdrawal amount. While waiting for the magic money machine to do its thing, I idly tapped my fingers in random patterns on the touch screen.
Suddenly, a standard Windows XP taskbar and Start button appeared.
Being curious, I tapped the Start button. Kinda freaked me out when a complete Start Menu appeared. Everything was there, including Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and Windows Media Player.
I can't believe that neither the ATM machine manufacturer nor the bank put any effort into building a custom, stripped-down image to run the bank's cash machines...
When drinking one night with a former roller coaster technician who had decided to get into the less stressful job of datacenter ops, I found out something terrifying about a famous (and, it should be said, injury/fatality-free as far as I know) catch & release roller coaster.
The coaster is designed such that the train car is loaded at a station. Then a tractor mechanism pulls it backward, up to the top of a steep incline. Once at the top, the mechanism releases the car, and the train goes rocketing through the station, through a series of tight loops and twists, and then coasts up an identical steep incline on the other end. There another mechanism catches the car, drags it all the way to the top, and then lets go, sending the car back through the series of loops and twists in reverse. The car decelerates up the incline back on the original side, is caught once again, and returned gently to the station for boarding.
All of these catch mechanisms need to know the velocity and weight of the train car in order to properly catch and decelerate it without hurting any of the occupants. Those values will change with every load of passengers, due to people's varying weights and their distribution around the car, so they have to be calculated on the fly.
The software that does this, the engineer swore to me, runs on...
Windows 3.11.
This knowledge made future rides on that particular coaster a hell of a lot more scary.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
And in my experience managers tend to go with the solution that the largest percentage of the population and staff use. Granted the trend towards Microsoft software is on the downside but they are still king of the hill. For now.
You can't expect people to just up and leave software that they're familiar with. I reference college students where I work. We have two rooms, similarly laid out. One room has HP DC7600s, the other Intel iMacs. People chose the room with the HPs showing the typical Windows screensaver over the Macs (which dual boot!) - why? Because it's friggin familiar. And you can't change that by saying the software is crap, because there isn't a usable alternative that appeals to the masses.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
That's just to keep you from stealing their clicky-pens.
I can confirm this as well. I was in the Massachusetts General Hospital laying in an fMRI tube because I was participating in a psychology study (and getting compensated financially). After a few minutes of inactivity I wondered when things would start happening - they soon extricated me from the tube. Turns out the cause of the problem was that the Siemens machine running Embedded Windows (as proven by a prominently-affixed license sticker) had locked up while I was entubed, and they had to reboot. After that it worked fine, and the fMRI went off without a hitch.
>I presume you mean Windows CE?
No, he means Embedded Windows, like Windows XP Embedded: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/embedded/products/whichproduct/default.mspx.
(What scares me is that you work on embedded systems and have never heard of it. I've never even touched embedded systems work and I know about it.)
You can't expect people to just up and leave software that they're familiar with.
While that sounds good it doesn't wash. It depends what you are setting up to do. If you want a permissive, bug ridden system where most of your company's bandwidth is used for P2P and every three months your clients call you to tell you their computer has slowed to a crawl, go ahead and use Windows.
If you are running a class where you are developing software that runs on Windows, then use Windows. Fine. If you want to run a Windows Only App, and it won't run in Wine or there is no Mac equivalent, then no probs, you win, go for Microsoft.
But if you want a system where the idea is to minimize the cost of installing and maintaining terminals, maximize the portability of people's computer setups, and give people enough freedom to play without crippling everyone else's system, then go for a thin client model using Linux or BSD. For most people there is no 'familiarity' problem in clicking on an icon, doing stuff and then going 'File -> Save' then 'File - Quit' or finding a the little X in the top right corner.
And who ever said you had to use a mac?
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
... well ok, not quite, but still! There's an ATM at my school which embodies the mother of all WTFs in my oppinion. It's a DIEBOLD ATM with a _headphone jack_ which usually displays the Windows XP login screen with a big error message saying that the bank domain is not available! If you think I'm making this up I wish to present to you... the evidence: http://www.dumpt.com/img/viewer.php?file=wmbbbwi8otsxgqlmi93u.jpg
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
Most of those applications shouldn't be running Windows, or any other full featured OS, anyways.
One of the big problems with MS is the tendency to want to squeeze the same type of desktop into any environment whether or not it makes sense.
If the only thing the computer needs to do is show an arrow, I'm really not sure why Windows is necessary, MS-DOS could do that efficiently, especially if it never needs to change arrow types. Back when I used DOS still, most of the time when it froze it would continue showing the last image. If showing one image is the only requirement, then DOS can still crash and do the job.
One could also go with something like damn small linux as well. But for several of those applications a stripped down OS of virtually any sort is going to be a better choice, even if it is just a stripped down version of Windows.
I know.
It's bad enough when I try to order a pizza online.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
"While that sounds good it doesn't wash. It depends what you are setting up to do. If you want a permissive, bug ridden system where most of your company's bandwidth is used for P2P and every three months your clients call you to tell you their computer has slowed to a crawl, go ahead and use Windows."
The last person to use our lab equipment for P2P had his associated UNIX account probshelled for 6 months. 6 months of no e-mail, no internet, no lab access.
And for the record, our DeepFreeze'd machines along with hard-disk images results in one machine out of 50 going bad in about a 6 month period.
I don't know where you work, but those symptoms sound more indicative of user (or administrative) stupidity.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
Sue them for what? Microsoft makes no guarantees. Read your license agreement.
I live in Korea, where every computer runs Windows, no matter how minimal the need. POS terminal in large supermarkets, airport arrival/departure information screens, ATMs, monitors which loop the same video in full-screen all day, every day.
Korea spends a lot of its time being nationalistic (just look at the anti-U.S. mad cow demonstrations happening now), yet they send I-don't-know-how-many-billions of dollars to the U.S. for Windows XP every year. My Samsung hard drives even used to come with an OEM version of XP.
Put identity in the browser.
I worked on an X Ray system that run Windows 2000. There was actually an earlier Linux version but the customers wanted Windows for some reason. I'm not sure why, installing applications on a X Ray system seems to me to be incredibly unwise.
But it wasn't as bad a decision as you think. The actually X ray and display was essentially a separate machine. There was a PCI bus driven by the Windows box but everything was set up so that if the Windows side crashed the X Ray would continue to work. There was a dedicated monitor and the UI could be handled either with a mouse or with dedicated buttons. One of the tests was that you could continue to use the system while Windows rebooted from a BSOD. Or failed to reboot actually, we'd overwrite the MBR and the dereference a null pointer in kernel mode WinDbg which would trash the machine irrevocably.
Essentially all desktop stuff is crap compared to well designed embedded systems. Embedded systems, at least good ones, don't call malloc except at initialization to avoid memory fragmentation. The code is much simpler - the X ray system would initialize the hardware and then sit in a loop waiting for commands from the hard keys. Code coverage was 100%, and the actual code was tiny, only a few 10s of kilobytes. The embedded system didn't have a filesystem and didn't do any dynamic loading - an image was booted from flash and that was it. The hardware was absolutley sealed, unlike in a desktop environment where people can install a $5 webcam with buggy drivers. There was even a hardkey to disable UI events from Windows - from Windows POV the UI device would be unplugged, just in case the Windows UI application went apeshit and overloaded the embedded side with bogus UI events. People worked out worst case interrupt latency and used vxWorks, a very light weight OS. All the critical stuff worked in this environment or was in hardware.
Essentially the Windows PC was a glorified Human Interface device but everything was set up so the hard buttons were a more convenient system anyway. So people actually doing X Rays would use those. The point of all this was that we couldn't prove the desktop stuff was reliable so we worked on the assumption that it wasn't.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
While that sounds good it doesn't wash. It depends what you are setting up to do. If you want a permissive, bug ridden system where most of your company's bandwidth is used for P2P and every three months your clients call you to tell you their computer has slowed to a crawl, go ahead and use Windows.
This is hyperbole or ignorance.
In controlled environments, modern versions of Windows don't have these performance problems.
I live in Korea, where every computer runs Windows,
(just look at the anti-U.S. mad cow demonstrations happening now)
You'll end up with mad cow one way or another. If we can't send the cows to you, we'll feed them to MS programmers. We've been doing it for years.
Denny Crane
Another day, another update to a Google android app.
It's worse for use as a desktop OS than some of the other examples in that list. Building controls, manufacturing controls and SCADA networks are, for instance, examples where Windows is actually passable. Why? A very controlled environment and lack of Internet connectivity. The main source of memory leaks and degradation over time is third-party sources, whether applications or drivers. Windows still has a significant number of inherent security flaws, but in these applications the systems should not be connected to the general Internet. This makes it a lot more difficult for an attacker to access the system.
The control over installed third-party systems and lack of external systems connectivity means that Windows tends to be a lot more stable in these environments than on an average desktop PC. The greatly reduces the potential for the jokes about "viruses" and "Trojans" on these systems the author joked about. It's not necessarily the best tool, as a custom Unix or Linux OS can provide much better general uptime and the ability to potentially fix any issues yourself, but it can be an adequate tool.
It's simple, really.
So simple that nobody does it, for reasons unknown to anyone.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
With Linux there is no accountability.
I don't know if you're a troll or an idiot, but the end result is the same. This is utter and complete bullshit.
My company wouldn't have several dozen fully-paid-up RHEL server licenses if we weren't damn sure who was accountable. We'd slap CentOS or something similar up and save a few bucks.
And if Linux isn't good enough for you, you go with something solid and reliable like Solaris or maybe AIX or possibly (depending on the application) a stripped-down high-reliablility embedded OS. You don't go with some rinky-dink toy like Windows. That's bordering on negligence right there. You can't sue Lego if you rebuild your car's chassis using their plastic bricks, and then get in a auto accident and discover you have no crumple zone. It's not Lego's fault you tried to do something insanely stupid. Using Windows for any sort of critical app where people's lives may be at risk is nearly as stupid and negligent as driving around with nothing but small plastic bricks between you and the SUV in the next lane.
(This story so obviously needed a car analogy.) :)
I am taking no extraordinary measures in the day to day operation of my gaming PC.
I run as a limited user.
I patch Windows monthly.
I don't run software that claims to put "HAWT NUDE CHIXXXORZ" "RIGHT ON YOUR DESKTOP!".
It's simple, really.
Hate to be the one to break it to you... those are extraordinary measures.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
While that sounds good it doesn't wash. It depends what you are setting up to do. If you want a permissive, bug ridden system where most of your company's bandwidth is used for P2P and every three months your clients call you to tell you their computer has slowed to a crawl, go ahead and use Windows.
Bullshit. Every single "problem" you listed there is indicative of incompetent administration, not the system. Where I work, we have upwards of 5,000 Windows XP desktops, 250 Windows 2003 servers, and a few Redhat Enterprise servers. We don't have any of the problems you listed. Re-imaging PCs is extremely rare because we don't let the users do anything TOO stupid, and the Cisco Catalyst switches prevent any traffic getting out except through our properly configured firewalls. If you're having the problems you list with a Windows network you run, you'd better quit and let a REAL admin take over.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Well, I certainly hope so. From what I hear those machines are indeed standalone. However, you just need one doctor with a laptop that is infected connecting directly to such a machine and mayhem ensues. Are they allowed to do that? Probably not.... Will they do it? Probably yes... :-(
You would be surprised how much medical equipment is connected to the internet. My mother is a CT tech who works the night shift (in the USA). Rather than have a radiologist at each hospital all night to interpret the scans, they have one radiologist receive all the scans from all the hospitals in their group over the internet. The CT scan system is online: it takes the scans, stores them digitally, and then transfers the files to wherever they need to go.
They supposedly have a firewall and a VPN, but their IT department is not so bright, so I wouldn't count on them to be able to configure it correctly. I have heard tales of spyware infections of the CT scan terminal due to employee web surfing, and an employee who was (incorrectly) accused of viewing porn sites on the job.
Even when medical equipment is not directly connected to the internet, you can be pretty sure that patient records are stored on internet-connected machines (for things like sharing records between hospitals in the same system, etc.). It may not be directly life-threatening, but it certainly is a huge privacy concern.
Give up, those bigots don't get it.
I used to do IT security stuff and whether it's Windows or Linux there's not a big difference in security from the technical POV.
Imagine if 90% of the desktop users in the world used Ubuntu/Suse as their desktop O/S and don't do the sort of thing you say you do for your windows box. You'd have the same problems all over again. There was at least one windows malware that spread via _requiring_ users to actually enter passwords to decrypt zipfiles and run the resulting executables. Requiring some user to (for example) run a malware perl program is nothing in comparison, and go figure the limits of what perl malware can do on a typical desktop machine, it can even google for new instructions and download them.
Whether it's Linux or OSX, if you run the "HAWT NUDE CHIXXXORZ" trojan your user account's info will be at risk, and the trojan would be able to spam/DDoS the world from your box, and do anything your user account can do (turn on the mike, cam etc).
In fact with Windows, sandboxing of programs (via software firewalls) is more common than with Desktop Linux where the isolation is more at a "per user" level. Server Linux has SELinux and AppArmor, but that's not desktop ready.
I am a Korean, who also uses Ubuntu on a daily basis. Maybe I can answer this question.
To get the Korean people use Linux, some things must be solved first.
1) A good localization team which can catch up all the changes
2) ActiveX-free site designing practices
It seems that 2) is somewhat getting better, since I find that many webpages that didn't render properly starts to get rendered quite well on Firefox. Although there still are many websites that doesn't properly run without ActiveX, it isn't that serious in many cases. I guess it is because people are suddenly figuring out that ActiveX is insecure, unreliable, and may cause a whole lot of portability problems (surprise, surprise). Now, they try to implement them using Flash or plain Javascript.
Now, what remains is when doing anything related to banking or shopping, since the Korean government requires all financial transactions to use their own way of digital signatures, which requires additional libraries. AFAIK, there is no regulation which limits its implementation to be in ActiveX, but the only problem is that nobody implements it in anything else. I believe there is a Java implementation which ran as an applet, but is seriously outdated since most people stuck with Windows anyway.
Actually, I think the localization problem is more serious. Although many applications are well localized, it's still hard to find every newest distribution to be fully localized (I'm not even talking about beta versions). And it may cause problems, even if the number of non-localized messages is small.
Combining it with a lack of cheap Linux programmers (also caused by the lack of localization, since the cheap workforce isn't so good at English anyway), I don't think we in Korea would see some serious Linux usage over here.
ps : the mad cow demonstration isn't actually against United States - it's against the Korean government which didn't even try to do any negotiation at all - they simply threw the towel, even giving up their right to have any power to protect themselves in case of an outbreak of mad cow disease or whatsoever. Now suddenly, the government figured out that people actually did care about public health. (surprise, surprise).
Probably not.
But I have to admit, that my old P166 with a fully patched Windows 95 ran quite well. If it had been possible to add USB support, I'd probably still be using it.
Guess I'm a victim of Windows burnout. I started out in 1995 genuinely liking Windows. But a decade of trying to keep that house of cards propped up and running on a hundred or so PCs soured me pretty thouroughly. I'm not wild about Linux, but I can live with it. And it is improving albeit not as quickly as I'd like. OTOH, I detest each new version of Windows more than the last. How can people possibly subject themselves to that thing? Do they spend their spare time -- assuming that they have any -- pounding thumbtacks into their foreheads?
***For the rest of us, the reboot/reinstall cycle is simpler.***
If you had told us in 1968 that in 2008, computer software would work so badly that periodic reinstalls would be a normal maintenance procedure, we'd have laughed at you. Silly us.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey